Author: bryan

spring break

This week was spring break, although it only sort of went down as such. Leslie didn’t have the week off, which sort of put a damper on travel or recreation, and on Monday the initial reviews of our SIGGRAPH paper came back, which we had about 48 hours to rebut. At most conferences it’s just an accept/reject right out, but for some reason at SIGGRAPH they give you the chance to answer the criticisms of the reviewers before they make the final decision. We got pretty good reviews–I think we have a good shot at getting in. We sent off the rebuttal on Tuesday without too much fanfare. I spent most of the rest of my productive time during the week working on the paper for SCA, trying to put together cool examples. I’ll be sure to share when we’ve got something neat.

Marathon training continues apace. Last Sunday I did a mildly punishing 9 miles, and this week I’ve been keeping up with the shorter training runs, and also climbing and doing yoga. My food intake has increased accordingly… I feel like a large portion of my waking hours are now spent preparing and consuming food, or burning into oblivion all the resultant calories with Sisyphean trips to nowhere on treadmills, yoga mats, up and down walls. Tomorrow is 10 miles. I hope there’s a good movie on cable that will carry me through the hour and a half or so, and I should remember to bring something to eat this time.

midterm, marathon

This last week I had my (only) midterm for my (only) class, graduate networking. It was a reasonable test and I did reasonably well on it, I think. Otherwise I’ve been working on that new paper for SCA, fighting various pieces of software to simulate what’s basically an intestine. I’ll be sure to post the movie once I get it done.

We got initial reviews back from our SIGGRAPH paper, which were very good on the whole. Most of the reviewers seemed to think we should be accepted, and the problems they found I think we can find resonable responses for (which we send in the form of “rebuttals”). If the paper actually does get in, I’ll be very stoked. At the least I’ll have a good reason to go to LA this summer.

I’ve started training for the San Francisco Marathon. I know it sounds insane, but when I started college, I made a resolution that before I turn 25, I will run a marathon. As it turns out, I turn 25 this November, so this seemed like the last viable opportunity. My brother is training with me. Let me be clear about something: I am not a hardcore runner. I am not even really a runner, except in the sense that I have “run” and own a pair of “running shoes.” I don’t pine for long, lonley stretches of track to jog down. I’m actually kind of lazy. So, when I say I’m going to run a marathon, I want to assure you that I’m doing it in the laziest possible way. So, our fundamental goal is to get our selves to the physical state where we could complete a marathon without permanently damaging ourselves while doing as little as possible “running” to prepare for it.

Specifically, we’ll probably be doing 11-ish minutes per mile for the actual race, and train by running just three times a week until the actual marathon (July). I have my first long-ish run scheduled tomorrow (9 miles). The schedule is set up so that every week I have one long run and two short runs. Eventually the long run gets up to 24 miles, but I’m going to just not think about that yet. At our pace, running 24 miles will take over 4 hours. Not thinking about it. No. For now, 9 miles. About an hour and a half. Water. Gummi bears. I’ll be fine.

new paper, CA weather returns

So, while in NYC I got an email from James about another paper, this one for SCA, that extends the one we submitted to SIGGRAPH. It should certainly shake things up for this semester. Due on 20 April or thereabouts.

In other news, we have officially reverted here in norcal to the standard 70-and-sunny configuration which should persist until November or so. It arrived just in time for Ali, who visited for a few days at the end of his spring break. He came in Wednesday night. Thursday he came up to Berkeley with me, saw the campus, had lunch with the graphics folke, and then we went to Ironworks to climb. He witnessed first-hand the shockingly over-rated (in difficulty) routes. Friday we worked, went shopping for a delicious lamb and mint sauce dinner Ali came up with, then went home and got (almost) too drunk to cook it. After dinner was savored, we went to a go-cart racing track we found in Fremont (Doug, reluctantly sober, drove us) and managed to place 1-2-3 (Doug, Ali, Bryan) despite our mild inebriation.

Saturday we slept in, visited SF, and ultimately ended up at my place. I took Ali to the airport the next morning.

Spring break. Two weeks. Nutty.

nyc coverage soon

We just stumbled in a little while ago from an amazing trip to New York. I didn’t post any updates after the first day because, basically, we were always either out or asleep. Soon pictures will be posted with the full narration of our adventures.

Also, the new server is live (whee!). You might notice an improvement in performance (I do, anyway). Let me know if anything seems weird.

nyc arrival

After an uneventful day of travel, we’re in New York. The view from the plane as we flew in was great… right up over Manhattan. We got in a cab and told the driver where to go. “Where is that?” he asked. So, I oddly found myself looking through a street map of New York finding the place. I really didn’t expect to be giving directions to a NYC cabbie, but hey.

Dinner was had at an excellent, mellow sushi place near George’s. George’s place itself is outrageous. A co-opy warehouse loft that get’s rented out for yoga and whatnot with about 10 people living in a cordoned off section. Infinite points awarded. I may die never living in a place as cool as this–fundamentally because I hate sharing a kitchen.

Tomorrow we’re tentatively scheduled to wander around Brooklyn, then make our 1pm reservations at The River Cafe, the swank-ass joint that Cam and Matt gave us brunch at for xmas. We’re also going to try to get in to see a UCB theatre show in the evening, but tickets are up in the air for that.

adding and dropping

The semester has worked it’s way up to a gallop. One of my classes, “computational geometry,” has been computationally kicking my ass. My current plan is to stop taking it for a grade for my sanity’s sake. Otherwise things are peachy, I need to restart my research engine after the long burn of SIGGRAPH. Cool things of note:

  • I moved into an office with some other graphics folks. This is significantly better even than my already serendipitous office down the hall from the graphics people. I’m also right next to the communal Xbox, which seemed a reason for concern but hasn’t been a problem yet.
  • Speaking of Xboxes, I have one now, though I’ve yet to play any Xbox games on it. What I have done is disassembled it, solder a chip in its innards, and put it back together. Why? Because now the Xbox will, at my whim, run any NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, Gameboy, and Arcade game ever. I’m not saying that I have copies of all these games–what blatant piracy that would be! Ok actually I do.
  • Going to New York the day after tomorrow. No doubt much posting of pictures and events will be done
  • Awesome Valentine’s dinner

new overt on the way

So, our year with Servepath (SUCK!) is almost over, and Ali found a great place to colo in Michigan, so we’re going to set ourselves up with a little server there and hopefully things will work out better. It’s actually not all that little–the new box is a 2.8GHz P4 with a gig of RAM and 240GB of space… quite a step up from our current 20GB. I imagine the switch over to the new server will be sometime in the next couple of weeks. Nothing should change for anyone using overt, but there might be a few problems here or there. Just let me know if there is any trouble.

it is done.

My typical day for the last week before the SIGGRAPH deadline went something like this:

Wake up at 8, shower, dress, eat. get on my bike about 9:30 and ride to the BART station. Spend the next hour in bliss reading a book or a magazine that has nothing to do with smoke. Get out at Berkeley, walk up the hill to Soda (since the campus buses mostly weren’t running). Arrive at Soda about 11am, an hour or so before almost anyone else will show up. At noon, join the author of the paper I was helping with (also named Bryan). Work on getting smoke to look right until the last train home (usually 11-11:30pm). Repeat.

Now, to be honest, not every day was like that. I took a few nights off to spend with Les or to hang out with friends and exercise, but mostly that’s the way it went. It was gruelling, but mostly fun. The atmosphere in the lab of all the people working day and and out on the papers was electric. I was usually one of the earliest to leave. Bryan stayed many nights until 3 or 4, and he had company.

At the end I got to help out with more than just rendering. I put together figures, and also helped on the text. In the end our product was a 5-page paper and a 2-and-a-half-minute video. I think, in sum, the work I did for those two weeks exceeded that which I did in any three months at Apple. But what motivation. Looking into the future, I hope that writing the paper can be done another way. It’s just not my style to pack it all into a month of frenzied work at the end. Hopefully I can exert enough control on the process to work mostly during the day the next time around–when I’ll hopefully be working on my own paper.

Anyway… quite an experience. It has triggered some serious slacking this weekend, so I’ll probably only start thinking about my classes tomorrow when I have to go back to school again.